Captive pandas are simply used to milk money from gullible humans who don’t realise the full stupidity of the exercise, says The Mirror's Fleet Street Fox

Except we’re not sure that it is. It might not be. Pandas are odd creatures with reproductive habits best described as whimsical.

For all we know it could be a desperate bit of propaganda by Alex Salmond, trying to replace the pound with a currency made entirely of baby bears.

It certainly has all the hallmarks of one of his brilliant ideas.

There is hope, though – hormones in the urine and that sort of thing.

A lot of fingers are crossed that TianTian is expecting, which is, after all, the reason she was shipped to Edinburgh in a crate, locked in a cage and artificially inseminated with sperm from the panda next door after she refused to mate with him.

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Pregnancy hopes: Edinburgh Zoo panda Tian Tian

The zoo is paying £6million over 10 years to the Chinese government for these two. They need to get their money’s worth.

When she eventually gives birth there will be a lot of noisy baby babble to drown out the sound of the big fat “KERCHING” that will ring out across the nation.

Because breeding pandas does not save them.

We’ve been doing it for years, and it’s not helped one iota.

It does not make a damn bit of difference to the problems they face as a species. Their habitat is fragmented and destroyed, and they are in an evolutionary cul-de-sac that means they cannot adapt.

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Bamboo: Tian Tian tucks into a snack

Pandas in zoos are simply used to milk money from gullible humans who don’t realise the full stupidity of the exercise they’re watching.

TianTian and her mate Yang Guang – I say mate but it’s not like she had a choice in the matter – arrived at Edinburgh Zoo at the end of 2011.

The hype was so great you’d think they did daily matinees on roller skates.

People lined the streets waving panda flags. Edinburgh Zoo laid on panda keyrings, panda cups, panda tea towels and panda FairTrade hats, which must surely be the most ironic invention in history.

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On the prowl: Tian Tian in her enclosure

A sustainably-made hat in the shape of a panda – sold to support the continuing exploitation of pandas, which are unsustainable except in making people money by selling hats that look a bit like panda.

Amazing, really, when you think it through. There’s even a panda tartan.

The zoo built £275,000 cages, laid on £70,000 of organic bamboo every year specially flown in from Amsterdam, and installed a webcam so you can watch them defecate up to 40 times a day.

Visitor numbers leapt by 200%. Tickets are £16.50 for an adult, £12 for children.

Pandas have a 36-hour mating window once a year and last year TianTian and Yang Guang gave it a half-hearted go.

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Mate: Male panda Yang Guang at Edinburgh Zoo

In the wild, she would mate with four or five males and there would be a 90% chance of a pregnancy. But in captivity pandas can’t really be bothered and besides, the males are a bit under-endowed to be competent at it.

They also don’t get pregnant straight away. They can carry a fertilised egg around for months and start cooking it only when the time is right and if they remember.

Her carers say that if an egg was fertilised, TianTian may have reabsorbed it due to stress.

That would probably be the stress of captivity, seeing as she doesn’t have predators or personal loans to worry about.

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Filling up: Yang Guang was at Edinburgh Zoo during the breeding season

The hype died away. Visitor numbers dropped to a mere 40% increase year-on-year and then, in April, TianTian and Yang Guang were brought together to mate once more.

TianTian said no.

Uh oh.

So then the zoo artificially inseminated TianTian and science being more proficient at this than pandas, the signs are that this time she’s not just conceived but also started baking the thing.

If one or more babies is born, we probably won’t see them for months. They’re so tiny that panda mums have been known to accidentally sit on them.

If it's twins, in the wild she would pick one to survive and abandon the other so the chances are the zoo staff will have to intervene and maybe even hand-rear the cubs.

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Bulking up: Here he is having a feast

Then they’ll be put on show. And after two years they’ll go back to China, to the panda-breeding centres where, if lucky, they’ll be plonked in a fenced-in reserve where they’ll be subject to research, CCTV and tourism.

They will probably never be released into the wild.

Not only does that wild not really exist any more – China’s bamboo forests are being stripped by roads and industry, and filled with tourists, hotels, noise and lights – but captive pandas don’t understand it.

They look like pandas, they sound like pandas, but they don’t know how to be pandas.

It’s like locking a human baby in a cupboard until it’s a teenager and then sending it out into the world and expecting it to cope – chances are it won’t.

The best TianTian’s baby can hope for is being treated as a sort of exotic farm animal, alive but in factory conditions, being prodded by scientists trying to work out why there aren’t more of them.

Playful: Pandas wrestling in their enclosure

But it doesn’t take a degree to work out why they’re dying.

In 1976 there were 2000 wild pandas. In 2004 it was 1,596. We don’t know the current numbers, but it’s unlikely to be higher.

There are 62 nature reserves protected from housing or industry in the panda’s range, but some are less than a mile wide. It’s simply not sustainable.

But that’s all right, because the more endangered pandas are the more money they make.

The more zoos are prepared to pay $1million a year for a breeding pair – as Edinburgh does.

The more people will rush to seem them. The more scientists will spend research grants trying to understand them.

And the more panda hats can be sold.

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Locked up: Pandas Yang Guang and female Tian Tian

Meanwhile, our demand for Chinese-made panda products means the habitat is ruined a little more and other species that also need help don’t get our attention.

Pandas tug at our heartstrings, and make us empty our wallets. They’re cute and they’re rare and they don’t tell us it’s all our fault.

But it is.

The panda breeding programme keeps them locked up, causes stress, takes away their essential survival skills and perpetuates and endangered animal industry that does not dignify them or us.

The only way to save them is to save the bamboo – and bamboo, I’m afraid, doesn’t sell many hats.